


Gravitational Waves

by Syberina5



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Angst, F/M, Multi, Science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:14:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 21,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21875731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Syberina5/pseuds/Syberina5
Summary: It was all he could hear really, forget “The First Noël” or “Carol of the Bells.” In the last moments of his life his brain was going to serve up her saying “Then why do you still taste like her?” while his guts spilled out on the ground…
Relationships: Amy Gardner/Josh Lyman, Josh Lyman/Donna Moss
Comments: 16
Kudos: 56





	1. Definition

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I have been doing a rewatch of _The West Wing_ like so many others because I wanted to remember what Presidents, even Republican ones, are supposed to be like. My kingdom for Arnie Vinick.  
> Author’s Note: Seasons 4-5 I just, [sighs]. I get a rash when narrative sense making sort of flies out the window. There is so much slow build for seasons of Josh and Donna being quirky, cute, maybe just friends (which if they had just stuck with it would have been fine with me—we need more narratives where men and women are actually non-romantic friends even if they are both heterosexual) but Seasons 4-5 throw that to the ground and dance on it all while giving Josh the most cohesive romance with a _totally different character_ he ever has in the show. If Amy is in an episode it is all in service of her romance with Josh (even when she is talking to the First Lady)—and for a character who is supposed to be so staunchly feminist to fail the Bechdel so hard is bad humaning. Anyway, my team of doctors has discovered that the only way to get rid of the rash is fanfic. And I haven’t been able to find one that really solves this to my satisfaction (the only thing that actually clears up the rash) so—being the change I want to see in the world—I guess I am kind of writing it (this in no way means I will not be looking for a fic that might clear the rash up more quickly—I really hate being itchy—so feel free to make recs). 
> 
> TL;DR: This is gonna be painful.

Gravitational wave: a high speed ripple in space created by the movement of celestial bodies in orbit. The strongest waves are created when two such bodies (i.e. stars or black holes) orbit each other or merge. (https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/gravitational-waves/en/)

[via GIPHY](https://giphy.com/gifs/gravity-scientists-ripples-108Zp9ulzgJwgE)


	2. Gamma Ray Burst

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gamma Ray Burst (A narrow beam of intense electromagnetic radiation released during a supernova event, as a rapidly rotating, high-mass star collapses to form a black hole. -https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/glossary.html)

Josh trudged up the steps to the apartment with a killer headache. It had been a _day_. Well, every day at the White House was a _day_ , but this one would go on one of the top five lists—Most Bizarre, Most Frustrating, Most Confusing, he still had no idea. He seemed to be sighing every other step and had vice-gripped his hand around his own head to try and keep the worst of the pounding at bay. With any luck—not that Josh had ever had much good luck—Donna’d be in bed and long since asleep, he could sip off a tumbler of scotch, take a quiet shower, and slip in with her until his alarm went off in a few hours. It sounded like he might just survive tomorrow (whatever fresh hell that might bring) if the universe could make with the good luck.

He nodded at the agent—Agarwal was on nights lately—and opened up his own door to Donna wide awake and staring straight at him.

Yeah, he’d never really had any good luck.

***

The immediate look on his face registered as ‘Oh shit’—not a good sign. He tried to cover, but the first beat had already past. “You’re up,” he said a little too high and a little too surprised; strikes were just adding up like… who knew? She only pretended to keep up with baseball so she could get Josh to rant when he was ansty. 

“I am.” Donna stayed seated in the arm chair she’d dragged to face the door from its usual spot across the room. She tried to hide how she was biting her lip with her hand and let her eyes follow him as he puttered around the room. “Things run late with the strategy session?” She’d never hoped so hard for there to have been some Sit Room time that had wound him up and spun him loose too late.

“Later than expected.” His back was to her, a half shrug, distance.

She closed her eyes and braced herself. The feeling from below her stomach, from below her navel was only getting worse, was only trying to force the dinner she’d eaten with Katia and Ioli out her mouth along with words she had been trying to never think let alone say. 

“You and Amy get a lot plotted out?”

“Sam was there too.”

“He skipped the opera?” She watched him freeze and knew more surely. 

“I guess he was late. I should probably apologize to Marin.” She still hadn’t gotten a good look at his face since that first moment by the door. Another strike.

“What happened, Josh?”

“Amy agrees with you; we’re not going to get Hafley’s seat right now, maybe ever, which is nauseating. We’ve got a good ground work for the rest of the Mid-West and the Northeast is always solid. And she’s taking the initiatives off the table until after the midterms. That’ll soften ground in a lot of purples.”

Donna sighed. He was so stubborn, could never admit defeat; God, she loved that about him sometimes. “This isn’t going to work, Josh.”

“No, it’s not a mortal lock, Donna, but it’s a solid election strategy. You know fewer democrats vote in midterms than republicans. No get out the vote in an off year will make up the difference without a major motivator and we just don’t have one.”

“No, Josh,” she rose from the chair but made no other move towards him, “this.” She let it sit. He had to have noticed by now. He was never as oblivious as he wanted her to think he was. While he still wouldn’t look at her, he also didn’t seem to be looking away from the bags she had by the door. “I sat here for a long time tonight, just thinking. I’ve been trying to decide what I was willing to accept.” The laugh the bubbled out was a little bitter, but only a little. “Turns out you did too good of a job teaching me, giving me the chance and the space to see how smart and strong I am despite what I am willing to let men I care about do.”

“Donna—”

“I love you, Josh. I really do. But I also love me, and for a long time I thought that the person I loved had to come first, that it proved something. The only thing it has ever proved is that I cared more for them than they cared for me or I cared for myself. And I sat here and I asked myself where the line would be this time, what could I forgive and still love you, still be in love with you and what…” she looked away from how he just stared at the bags. “It’s a very detailed list.”

“They always are,” he mumbled rubbing his face and turning away.

“Well, when I am left to my own devices for long enough you get what you get. And this time it turns out that it was long enough to finish making the list,” she shrugged. “I took one look at it and saw exactly who it would make me. I’d be right back where I started: stuck in a relationship I hated but was afraid to leave, making sacrifice after sacrifice to prove to you, to myself that I did love you as much as I said I did and wondering why I always felt so cold.”

“You think I’m like him? You think a few late nights at work make me as bad as Dr. Freeride!” His anger seemed to finally give him the guts to look at her. “Donna, I’m the goddamned White House Chief of Staff. I fucking—”

“It makes you worse.”

He didn’t have a response to that. He looked gutted, as gutted as she felt. 

“You know what Cliff Calley read in my diary?”

“What?”

She couldn’t blame him, her brain had been turning circles for hours and she was just as dizzy. “Cliff read over and over how I justified that I couldn’t be in love with you and over and over about how I tried to decipher how you felt for me when you sabotaged the first date I went on or made up reasons I had to staff on the weekend and that was before you committed a felony to keep me out of trouble, before you scooped me out of my apartment for the Inauguration, before you showed up in Germany, and five more years’ worth of times you looked in my eyes and I thought, ‘ _Thank God, I’m not crazy_.’ Because this thing seemed to go both ways in those moments but then it would pass and you’d look at someone else—at Mandy or Joey or Amy or God knows who else—and I would be standing there with whiplash and trying to put my heart back in my chest.”

He whimpered and reached for her but she had to back away. 

“I made up such elaborate cover stories for you, all of these noble reasons why you chose them over me. But eventually I would come back to that it all just had to be wishful thinking. You weren’t in love with me. Ever. You loved me, sure, without me you would implode. You found me moderately attractive but in that safe girl next door sort of way. God, I was such an idiot.” She rolled her eyes at herself as his hands got lost on the way to his hair and he shoved them into his pockets. “I wanted you and I let myself see what I wanted to see and it was never harder to deny that you didn’t want me back than when Amy was around. You know, it was like I was some minor league pinch hitter that would get called up when the star grand slammer had an injury”—well, it wasn’t that she didn’t pay attention it just wasn’t worth remembering most of it. “If Amy looked like she’d be out for the season, there was safe reliable Donna to flirt with and smile at and make pant after you so your enormous ego wouldn’t have to take too much of a hit. And I was so eager. I loved you and I wanted you and I thought that was the closest I was ever going to get and I took it.”

She was crying now and wiped her face even as she took the last few steps to be in front of him. “It was nice to really have it, to fool myself long enough to look you in the face and smile and kiss you and know I wasn’t dreaming. Thank you for that. I meant it, Josh, I can’t imagine a future where I don’t love you,” she put her hand to his cheek. “But to be third or fourth to you, not just behind the country but behind whatever it is you feel for Amy… I like who I have become too much to go back to the person I was, even for you. Good bye, Joshua,” she said and kissed him until the sob ripped up her throat. She turned to the door and ignored his hands on her as he tried to pull her back and turn her around and continue the conversation without taking away her consent—he’d never touched her with more force than a toddler with a throw pillow unless they were having sex; sexually harass every woman on staff by creating a hostile work environment? Maybe. But put a bruise on her? Never. 

“Donna, this… this doesn’t make any sense. You, you can’t just walk out because a _work_ meeting with an ex-girlfriend ran late. What are you thinking? God, sleep on it at least. I mean where are you gonna go? You live here now. We… you said…”

“My saving’s account has gotten a bit more plush in the last few years, Josh. I can afford a hotel, a nice one even, for a little while if I have to.”

“Donna, I’m not saying that. I’m not… I’m just…I.” he flung about until she had one bag off her shoulder and the other hanging from her fist. “ _Nothing happened!_ ”

“Then why do you still taste like her?”

*** 

She hadn’t needed to turn around for him to see the scorching recrimination in her eyes, to feel it singe the hair off his body and probably leave him balder than ever. 

_Fuck._

He had no idea how he was going to fix this.


	3. Nonlocality

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nonlocality (The rather spooky ability of objects in quantum theory to apparently instantaneously know about each other’s quantum state, even when separated by large distances… - https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/glossary.html)

She wouldn’t answer his calls. He’d called for an hour solid to no avail and only stopped because she’d texted him, _I am going to sleep, Joshua._ He knew she couldn’t turn off her cell phone because of work, and that there had to be an agent standing outside her hotel room door—or more likely Andy’s or Carol’s front door—and that what she probably meant is that she was crying herself to sleep. Staying inside his apartment was probably one of the most difficult things he’d ever done and he’d come back from the dead once. 

He didn’t sleep, obviously. He was so shell-shocked that he didn’t even make it out of the living room or his dress shirt. He was actually late to work because he’d ended up sitting in the same fucking chair, unable to break the Oh Shit loop long enough to even start to form a plan.

By the time he found five minutes to get over to the East Wing, her assistant wouldn’t let him into her office, would only make an appointment and demand to know its purpose. He couldn’t very well say “To talk her out of leaving me.” He’d chosen the better part of valor and returned to his desk where he had Margret make an appointment. Only ten minutes later she asked him what it was for and by then he’d come up with the State dinner that was three weeks away. 

For three and a half minutes (which is longer than the walk over there and back and contained nothing that could not have been conveyed in an e-mail, phone call, or through assistants) she called him Mr. Lyman and was studiously professional and the woman that he’d known for over a decade wasn’t even in the room, much less giving him any openings to beg her—he still wasn’t entirely sure what to beg for—and so he’d left sure he looked like a scolded puppy and feeling like the bottom was still dropping out of his life.

He’d gotten back to his office to worse news. So much worse. 

“…and Amy’s here with the figures from—”

He grabbed Margret’s forearm, “Amy’s here?”

“Yeah, in your office with—” he stopped listening. He had to physically restrain himself from going back to the East Wing and sitting in full view of Donna’s new assistant—whose name had clearly been Bartleted out of his brain—until Amy left the building and went back to her coven in the OEOB. “Josh?” Oh yeah, Margret.

He hadn’t meant to slam his office door—no, really, he’d meant to leave it open so that Margret would hear and pass along the chain so that Donna would know he wasn’t… he’d never… it wasn’t… _Fuck_.

“So the subsidy numbers are—you okay there, J?” Amy asked when she got a look at his face.

He wanted to scream at her about how she’d screwed his life up for the last time, but he couldn’t find any words, so he just clenched his teeth harder and glared around the room. When he thought he finally had a couple lined up, he took a step toward her and realized his hand was out like he was going to literally go for her throat and stepped back, started pacing. 

“You cracked like an egg, didn’t you?”

“You,” he said in a tone that he usually couldn’t hear because he was in the middle of an episode and so he stopped talking and focused on his breathing.

“Jesus, J. You said nothing happened, cone of silence, no acknowledgement would be given, we just work together. And _then_ you go home and tell all like some blubbering WB character? I have to work with these people.”

He spun on her with what felt like fire in his chest. “ _You_ have to—” He turned away from her again and put his hands on his desk, focusing on the WWLD? Post-it: _“Boy did you really nail yourself to the wall this time, kid,” “You gonna hang yourself with that guilt today or tomorrow?” “At least you still go big or go home—though it’s not very homey right now, I’d bet.”_ Even the Leo in his head wasn’t being any help right now. _“You want help, kid, sometimes you’ve got to ask for it.” Well, finally Leo; thanks_.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Wrong with me? While there is no shortage of people willing to emboss you a list of what is wrong with me, Amy, let’s talk about what is wrong with you for a minute here. For the second time—the _second_ —someone proposed to you and your response was to try to sleep with me. This time with a lot less success. I was your friend last night. And it screwed my life.”

“Only cause—”

“I didn’t tell her. _Fuck_. Her bags were already packed, there are probably movers at our place right now,”—which had only just occurred to him, damn it—“her bags were already packed and she kissed me good bye and left. And the last thing she said to me—I tried to sell the party line: ‘Nothing happened’—and she said, ‘Then why do you still taste like her?’” It was all he could hear really, forget “The First Noël” or “Carol of the Bells.” In the last moments of his life his brain was going to serve up her saying “Then why do you still taste like her?” while his guts spilled out on the ground and it still wasn’t fixed—God, how was he going to fix this; no really: _Dear God, How am I going to fix this?_ —and he died and he would have to know he had done that to her for not just the rest of his life but for the rest of hers. He was going to throw up. 

“Josh…” Apparently he wasn’t the only one at a loss for words. “You…” Possibly taking her life in her hands Amy actually got closer. “You don’t look so good. Here,” she reached out to help him sit down and he jerked away. 

“Don’t you…” Josh had to rub his face to make sure there weren’t actual flames coming out his eyes. “You wanted to detonate our own life last night, Amy, and instead you blew up mine.” His voice cracked and he thought he might finally be past the shock enough to where his brain kicked back in. He shot past her to the main door and wrenched it open. “Get out. Leave the numbers and get the fuck out.”

Her mouth opened to speak and he clenched his jaw harder and it closed. He slammed the door as soon as it was clear—careless of the doubtlessly historic hinges—and he hoped Margret was gapping back at them and saw the flinch, saw whatever shock and remorse could have possibly been on display because Josh couldn’t stomach it. He had too much of his own.

*** 

She was rubbing her temples and stretching her jaw, trying to quell the throb so she could focus on what was in front of her. Donna kept telling herself her job was too important to too many people for her to let the break up become a string of bad days. Her continuously horrifying taste in men could not become the First Lady’s problem. Not that Josh was that horrible per se, Mike hadn’t been in the beginning, and even Cliff turned out to be one of the best things that had happened to the Bartlet administration’s first term because without his sense of justice there never would have been a second. Jack had been a decent guy who was just pissed at having his career derailed because he’d followed an order form the Commander in Chief and done his job well. And Josh…Josh saved the world on a regular basis, saved her more than once, loved her, she knew. God, he’d loved her enough to be guilt-ridden enough to pretend he was in love with her for the rest of his life when he wasn’t, when she knew he wasn’t, when he was in love with somebody else, or at least in lust which was probably more than she had ever really brought out in him. And she was back to that feeling in her belly like every molecule inside it wanted to be on the outside and was waging a civil war to make it happen. 

She added deep breaths to her routine.

“So,” Amy Gardner’s voice cracked across her office like thunder and Donna’s eyes burst open to find the woman only a few feet from the edge of Donna’s desk (which had once been Amy’s desk—why did Donna always have to share with this woman? Why could Donna never come before her in any damn thing?). “I owe you an apology.”

Not that Donna didn’t want to hear Amy grovel and beg for forgiveness but she really wasn’t up to details. “Why would you say that?”

“I just,” she waved stiltedly towards the door, “saw Josh.” She seemed to think Donna would have a response to her non-answer. “He was pretty upset.”

“Then maybe you owe him the apology.” Donna moved away, started sorting through some things on the credenza beside her desk and avoiding putting her “guest” in her eye line.

“He’s not really in the mood for it.” Again, when Donna didn’t respond, Amy had to fill the tense silence of her own creation. “You know how he gets. He can’t stop slamming around long enough to hear a word you’re saying, and the second he stops he just starts yelling.”

Donna felt her heart squeeze, fought the urge to explain yet again to this woman who had apparently wanted and had Josh in one way or another since they were are Yale together that what Josh was doing was trying to shut up the panicked voices in his own head telling him all the ways he’d fucked up—which she would not feel bad about because he did fuck up; he fucked up like eight times in orders of worsening magnitude (Donna could just start with the feeling guilty that he didn’t love her the way she clearly wanted him to love her and, rather than just telling her he only saw her as a friend, spending the better part of two years trying to convince both of them that he was in love with her).

“I am starting to realize that I prefer the yelling.” Amy’s diarrhea of the mouth continued. 

Donna just looked over her shoulder at Amy, then turned to face her…almost. 

“This silent indifferent thing you’re doing is creepy as all get out Donna, not gonna pretend it isn’t. I know you’re upset, like Everest upset right now and I,” she swallowed and bent her neck at a weird angle, “I am trying to fix it. I…. Last night was very definitely my fault. I was freaking out and Josh… he—”

“Makes his own choices like a big boy. Just like the rest of us grown-ups. You made a choice; he made a choice; I made a choice. That mine wouldn’t have happened without yours doesn’t make you responsible for my choice.”

“It kinda does though, Donna, and we both know why.”

“I don’t follow you and frankly Amy, I really don’t want to know why you think you are the center of _my_ universe. We’re not actually friends; I don’t want to be you and I certainly don’t want to sleep with you so the amount that you factor is actually quite small. If that’s all, you can go now.” And dismissing her like Donna was her actual boss and not her actual boss’s very recently ex-girlfriend was something Donna might need to send Dr. Bartlet a gift basket for teaching her. Sitting down at her desk, she tried to work on whatever was on top—Donna wasn’t entirely sure what she was editing, but it clearly had too many commas—Donna waited to be alone again.

Alas, Amy huffed and shuffled her feet and might have kicked the leg of one of the visitors’ chairs. “Look I don’t know why this is such a thing. You won, you got the guy, you—”

“It’s not a damn competition,” she finally yelled at Amy. “Josh isn’t a trophy to be won and put on display. Not everything is a fucking challenge you—” She cut herself off. “You can see yourself out.”

“Well, this has been a banner day,” Donna heard as the room finally began to return to silence.


	4. Accretion Disk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Accretion Disk (Diffuse material orbiting around a central body such as a protostar, a young star, a neutron star or a black hole. Gravity causes the material in the disc to spiral inwards towards the central body with great speed… -https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/glossary.html)

Margret had been an assistant to difficult and anxious people since her childhood. She started by helping her father manage his traveling sales career from home, taking long notes on figures and numbers over the phone while he dropped in nickels, dimes, and quarters to keep the call going. By the time she was old enough to be paid her own nickels and dimes for this sort of thing her father had stopped calling while he was away—he’d also stopped coming home—and her mother had pretty much stopped everything all together which left the entire family to Margret. And her homework, which was always impeccable—her teacher had said so in one glowing end of year report card, hand-written in penmanship Margret’d mastered that summer while three of her siblings had the chicken pox. 

Suffice it to say within a few years there wasn’t a lot she felt challenged by when it came to the actual job itself, even though a lot of it was labor intensive—more so for some than others (cough, cough Josh Lyman, cough, cough) so she took to filling her brain with a the interpersonal goings on around her. Leo had needed to know in his position as the boss of them. It is after all hard to be the chief of people if you don’t know anything about them and even harder to promote the people actually doing the work when subterfuge is part of the job description (what? It is in the subtext; pull any single one of the DNC’s public job descriptions and she can show it to you in at least four separate points). Which means that it might have been a little bit her fault that Josh and Donna were such a mess today (and Margret knew how much a mess Donna was because her assistant—Donna’s—was so sideswiped that he’d called Donna’s old assistant—who’d just been moved up into Legislative Affairs—and Katia had called Margret).

There were two major reasons that Margret felt more than a little personally responsible:

1) Margret had never made sure that Donna got the promotion she richly deserved. It wasn’t that she hadn’t told Leo just how valuable and capable and great Donna was both as Donna and as Josh’s Assistant. She had. She had a lot. Probably a little too much. But when Leo followed up with possible promotions Margret had horrible flashes of a veritable round-robin of assistants and sexual harassment allegations because no humans in their right minds would watch Josh interact with his staff for a day without hightailing it out of the bullpen—you had to really know Josh to love him…or be afraid of him, really a healthy dose of fear among his staff was for the best. So, even though Donna could have done well in just about any position in the building—including Margret’s—and even though she had heard in Donna and Josh’s many words how they felt about each other and even though she had heard from all the humans to pass through the COS office for three terms comment on how they too had noticed, Margret hadn’t made sure Donna got the promotion that might have made all the difference.

2) Margret hadn’t had an aggressive enough Amy Gardner policy. She’d instituted a couple of the old Mandy Hampton policies to keep the trouble to a minimum but Amy was no Mandy. Mandy Hampton was ultimately responsible to the team so she could be counted on not to really do things against their interest while she was on staff—that was apparently the sticky wicket of the clause though because as soon as she was out her loyalty stopped. Amy Gardner had no such allegiance. She was all for the party—as long as it agreed with her—but her guiding principles were her own, and Amy Gardner had no other true allegiances. This had created lots of problems and more than a few headaches for Leo. He’d really wanted Josh to be in a relationship that got him out of the building and—truth be told—away from Donna’s apartment. But that had only resulted in more and unnecessary legislative wrangling. With Amy Gardner working for the administration, running Legislative Affairs that stress had been less and the biggest part had been keeping her access to Josh as little and distant as possible because the more Amy could badger him in person, the more nutso he got; the man operated long-term in the nutso category (which is the only reason Donna could hack it as his assistant for eight years—she found his brand of nutso endearing, which really only a few other people could do for more than ten minutes of full on nutso). Things had been working pretty well. Way better than Margret had anticipated in most part because Amy hadn’t staged some sort of insurrection in order to move the administration two centimeters to what Amy herself wanted on something (which was pretty much Josh’s end of year review for the President). But Margret’s No Solo Meeting (of longer than five minutes) rule had been broken because she was the only one who knew the rule, and Sam left before it was over, and now Josh was cursing five and three-tenths of a foot from the door to the Oval—something he’d never done before, even that time he had a PTSD episode _in_ the Oval. And Donna…Donna had embargoed him from all communication that wasn’t strictly the business of the administration. In point of fact, she’s instructed her new assistant of eleven White House Days to delete any incoming e-mails from Josh that were not from Margret’s address or clearly titled for items of business (which Donna well-knew went through Margret and not Josh—he never met and e-mail subject he liked). So Donna wasn’t speaking to Josh so much as the office of the POTUS COS was speaking to the office of the FLOTUS COS, Margret had peeled Josh out of yesterday’s suit when he arrived in _late_ , and Josh had kicked Amy Gardner—rather loudly—out of his office shortly before she went up to the East Wing. All of which was a nearly dictionary definition for Margret Hooper: your Amy Gardner policy was not aggressive enough.

Unfortunately for Margret—and really the whole of the US was going to pay a little bit for this one—it wasn’t really something she could fix even with her considerable knowledge of interpersonal relationships and these particular interpersonal relationships. 

Every so often Josh would scream an obscenity (really just the one obscenity) and—silently—Margret would agree. 

Fuck indeed.

*** 

Ioli had seen some things and seen more things since moving into government work. None of it so much compared to what he’d seen as a member of the White House staff. Originally he had been across the street at the OEOB and the assistant for a bullpen full of paralegals to the counsel’s office. When there was an opening in the East Wing somehow his name had gotten handed up and before he knew anything about that he was interviewing with Donna Moss, the First Lady’s Chief of Staff. Soon enough Mrs. Santos herself walked in to quickly borrow Ms. Moss’ lipstick before a photo with some people on a special tour. And so had begun another new life. 

Ioli’d had a few. His mother had been a child when her parents dragged her out of Nigeria and into the collapsing US Civil Rights movement. But his mother had been born for revolution and had refused to marry the man who raped her, no matter the pressure her traditional Igbo Hunts Point neighbors heaped on her as the baby in her belly grew. And she refused to force her daughter to wear dresses or wear long hair as the shame and blame continued. She had refused to send her teenager to live with the Nigerian aunties when she was caught kissing a Dominican girl from a few blocks over. And each choice had given Ioli new life like a new flavor of oxygen, but none more so than when his mother had agreed to call her daughter a son. And now the President of the United States had shaken his hand and called him sir. 

When his boss (Call me Donna) had come in, obviously overtired and distressed, an explained that the man who, only days before, had her laughing to the point of tears even as she dodged a fourth attempt at a good bye kiss was _persona non grata_ , Ioli Olewale had done as she’d asked and then called for help—something he still marveled at being offered from the relative strangers of this place. 

Katia had not taken long to hike over from Legislative and listened to the tale with wide-eyed horror. 

“Has he shown up yet?” she’d asked.

Ioli had shaken his head. 

“It’s only a matter of time. You should start practicing your ‘No, Mr. Lyman. She’s unavailable, Mr. Lyman’ because you may have to physically hold him back from the door. He’s…” Katia had paused and made him nervous. “You know what you heard over in Counsel’s? Lyman’s a bulldog, Lyman’s a mad man, Lyman’s put Senators out to pasture for messing with him and sent the Navy packing, all that stuff?”

He’d nodded—he’d been intimidated until he’d met Josh Lyman and seen the man smile at his new boss. Ioli had never looked at a woman that way, but he would like to. 

“There is a reason for those stories. He can rain down fury like you wouldn’t believe.” His breath had suddenly been short. “She won’t let him fire you, but he will try if he thinks it’s going to get him what he wants. Remember, that man has bossed around multiple POTUSes…” she’d cocked her head, “POTUSi?” She’d shaken it off. “Doesn’t matter. This is a letter and spirit of her law,” Katia had pointed to the door behind him, “situation. You take care of her and keep her working, and we will all get through this.”

“But what _is_ this?” He’d asked, flummoxed. 

“I do not know, Ioli, but it is bad. Real bad.” 

He’d watched Katia leave on a sigh and tried to push the panic and fear down the way he had when he’d walked home alone knowing the whole neighborhood hated him. He’d firmed his resolve the way he had when one of the goons or some ballers would move into the sidewalk and see him. Donna wouldn’t need to worry about Lyman today. One pasty politician wasn’t up to the kind of brawl Ioli had grown up surviving. 

Sending that message with a look and carefully chosen words had been his intention, but then Josh Lyman had come through the hall to where Ioli checked through visitors to FLOTUS and her COS looking less like a master politician who could cost Ioli his new job and many others and more like someone who had spent the night on Avenue P. 

“I’m gonna,” he said, asking permission with his eyes for the first time ever to enter Donna’s office and nodding his head in that direction. 

“I’m sorry, Mr. Lyman, but she’s not available right now. I can make you an appointment.”

“Not,” he looked at the closed door like he’d just been kicked out of his house.

“She’s got five minutes after lunch.”

“Five minutes.” Ioli felt suddenly terrible. If this was how bad, how unguardedly bad Lyman felt then Donna’s acting capabilities were previously unknown. 

“What can I book this appointment as?”

“What?” The confusion on the man’s face this time was far more understandable. It was a new procedure (just hours since it was first implemented) 

“You know her,” he cordially nodded in the direction Lyman had earlier, “everything as organized as she can make it so it runs smoothly. This way she’s prepared and the five minutes goes a lot farther towards actually getting things done.” He watched a ghost of a smile drift around the edges of Lyman’s face, one of love and pride and understanding. “So,” he asked after several moments had passed, “what is the appointment regarding?”

“You know what,” Lyman said staring at the door still, “I’ll get Margret to set it up. I have no idea what my schedule looks like.” But Donna would, Ioli knew from experience, and she’d never not given him a couple of minutes before when he’s showed up unannounced in the East Wing.

Even as Lyman wandered away, still looking dejected and lost, Ioli yearned for this sense of hopeless disrepair to right itself. The joy in the White House, even during times of tragedy, had been one of the reasons he had loved the last eleven days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just finished the ending and woohoo doggie; you won't hate me forever at least. Just maybe a little while.


	5. Mass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mass (A measure of the amount of matter in a body…. Mass is often confused with weight, which is the strength of the gravitational pull on the object [and therefore how heavy it is in a particular gravitational situation]… -https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/glossary.html)

The atmosphere of the White House had never been so tense during the (comparatively) fledgling Santos Administration. It reminded Josh of the MS in how he felt when only he and four other people he spoke to daily knew and were afraid to talk about it. Only that feeling of isolation and fear he’d felt now seemed to be felt by everyone. Margret looked terrified of giving him his messages—particularly if there was one from the First Lady’s office. Sam jokingly asked him who died and when Josh didn’t answer but simply walked out of the room, Sam stopped laughing in general. Everyone knew something had happened, but no one had asked him what. Lou’s eternal hostility even dropped down a couple levels. Not Sam, not Margret or the President, not even Toby when he’d called because Sam had said something. CJ had sent him an e-mail from God knew where.

The overriding message was pretty much Fix It. Which was in many ways the best joke he’d heard in a week because if he’d had any idea how to fix it he would have done it the second he’d realized it was broken. But how do you reason with a woman who is sure she knows your mind better than you do—and is usually right--huh? He’d spent the first two days in shock and 12 hours after that wondering if—because she usually was—she was right: he’d mistaken the type of love he felt for her, if that was why he hadn’t jumped a mile the second Amy had been within a foot of him. 

At least at that point his mind settled enough that he could come up with a plan. Not a great one, but it would give him a chance to break through this Mr. Lyman shit she’d never pulled with him even when Congressman Bruno was in the meeting during the Congressional Oversight’s _censure_ of the President. Ultimately he was sure this was what he needed. He still didn’t really understand what had happened but he knew what hadn’t. 

This idea that Josh only loved her was kind of crap. Donna’d had some whoppers—getting some republican-voting local to change votes with her in fifteen to twenty minutes was definitely one of them—but this was next level. He had even done his due diligence by giving it full consideration. Devoted love—which was Donna’s point—wasn’t absent. He was devoted. He’d been devoted before, so devoted in fact that he’s helped her court Commander Wonderful (which still made him a little sick, but okay, she’d asked and he’d pretty much do anything for her—he’d bitch and he’d moan and probably whine or cajole, but he’d do it). He did not see this as a strike against him so much but Donna would because it was proof that, because he’d do anything for her, he might have led her along to keep from losing her—which might have been part of what went wrong before she’d left him… left the Bartlet Administration…whatever. It wasn’t like sibling love because he’d had a sister and had never once wondered which was softer, her boob or her sweater. It wasn’t parent child love because, while—ok, sure—he’d been there during the whole discovering her self-worth thing, he’d never diapered her and again _boobs_. Was she his friend? Undoubtedly but people say all the time that you’re supposed to marry your best friend and—well, Sam; but Josh definitely was not taking Sam on a honeymoon unless he was the driver or something so Josh had more time to solve the boob/sweater dilemma. Lust? Okay… okay, yes, lust could be a problem in this argument, but it would be a way bigger one if his interest in developing a boob-sweater dichotomy chart was purely for scientific purposes. And it wasn’t like he was out there testing any boobs he could find or—and this was the very important part of his argument—really interested in touching Amy’s when they had recently been on offer. He’d actually tried to not touch them. 

While there was a lot that was muddled in his mind about that moment, one thing he knew for sure was that even when he was trying to push Amy back he had flattened his hands out and away as much as he could so there would not be any accidental groping. Really, he’d mostly forced her off with the pasty side of his forearms. What little else he could put together about his thought process was that different parts of his brain had sent different messages and so his lips had not turned to ash rather than be touched. It was all a jumble of “ _Attractive woman touching you nicely!_ ” “ _This is a new brand of Amy Weirdness,_ ” “ _Ack! Wrong female! Retreat, retreat!_ ” “ _This is very familiar; I remember this_ ,” and “ _What the_ fuck _just happened here?_ ” that left him spinning. 

While this definitely wasn’t a set of logic proofs he could slip into a meeting on the First lady’s new malaria awareness campaign, he was at least confident that because none of the thoughts and been _Mmmm, Amy; I missed this_ he was at least not in love or in lust with her. Where that left him and Donna he had no idea. He’d have to convince her somehow—probably not with the boob-sweater research (although he would really like to get back to his previous boob-sweater investigation; Donna had lots of sweaters)—and he couldn’t do any of that if he couldn’t figure out what was actually going on in her head.

So he’d gotten Sam to lure the new assistant—Ian maybe; Oliver? Josh had no idea but there were definitely vowels—away during a time that “Will Bailey” had scheduled a lunch meeting to catch up while he was in town. By some miracle neither the First Lady nor any other part of her staff was in the outer office when he tried to stealthily breeze through. Of course he tripped on a chair leg which knocked over a stack of binders and when he dove to catch them he must have called out because Donna had clearly come into the room and discovered him based on her icy, “Mr. Lyman.” So he’d looked up from where he was awkwardly crouching to see her standing with her arms crossed (over a very soft looking sweater, it should be noted).

He went to respond but the debacle had wiped every planned thing from his mind except that he had intended to start with saying her name but given the circumstances he thought maybe he should start with a stiff Ms. Moss and try to use some pretext to put her at ease before he hit her with the whole “I love you and you’re being ridiculous” argument. Since she was still standing there with her glare at a third of its full power he was willing to bet he’d started to look like that goldfish CJ’d had forever. 

“Right,” she said and went back into her office.

He deflated like a balloon and decided she was still Donna and any attempting to right the pile on the floor would either wig her out in its unusualness or annoy her because he’d done it wrong. Dusting his hands off on his pants—because why not—he tried to walk normally into her office like the whole thing hadn’t just happened. 

He plopped into one of the chairs in front of her desk and said, “So,” like it was a sentence, like he was prompting her to continue with something she’d been in the middle of saying. 

The expression she turned on him reminded him of his mother and Dr. Bartlet which was awkward—everything was awkward and not the kind that used to make Donna get pink and smile at him. 

_Right. What would Leo do?_

“I’ve given what you said a lot of thought, and I…there are… I mean… questions.”

The look got more intense. 

“I have questions.”

“About what?” she asked in a tone usually reserved for Republican Senators who vote to defund Planned Parenthood.

“What you said…” no change, “the other night…” still none, “at home?”

She blinked, slow and long, her face muscles shifted, and she looked like Donna again. At the sight of her the rock in his chest relaxed and started beating again. 

“Josh,” and really her saying his name even in exasperation and disappointment shouldn’t bring him to tears of relief, but it had been a pretty awful few days personally if not really professionally (another miracle). She sighed. “What questions?”

“Well, first there’s… just the one I guess: Can you explain?” The look she leveled at him was at least familiar territory. “I’m serious because—I swear, Donna—I was listening and I’ve been thinking about it. Yes, Amy kissed me and it probably went on for longer than it should have because I was really confused—and I mean that—really confused. I messed up, and I should have told you when I got home but, I admit, I was scared and I thought that if I just cone of silenced it, it would have never happened and this,” he waved the long distance between them, “would never happen and I could just keep being… you know… happy.” Because, God help him, he had been. Even with all the stress and the hours and the drama he hadn’t wanted to just sack out on his couch. He’d wanted to go home _to Donna_.

“Josh,” the tone was worse—Not Mrs. Bartlet worse but still. She was rubbing her forehead in the way that meant she had a head ache. Usually it was an excuse to touch her, rub her neck, shoulders, and now that they were together even her temples, snuggle her in and kiss them until she relaxed and felt better. This time though her body language told him that if he moved a hair closer he might lose a limb, definitely a few fingers. 

“You said that you loved me, you said that I loved you—and I would like it on the record that on these key points we are in total agreement—and you said that because I was putting you third or fourth you thought that eventually you’d lose yourself with me the way you did with Dr. Freeride,” —and he could tell that the edge of disgust he’d tried to keep out of his voice had been there nonetheless. “And I don’t get that. If you feel like you are that far down the on my list of priorities, then I do not think you have been paying close enough attention. You think I made Amy a bigger… thing? When I was Deputy I didn’t get over to the East Wing more than once a week. I’m over there to see you four times a day—and Margret knows because apparently there’s a spreadsheet. Which is _before_ we go home together. And Amy—if this is really about Amy—she and I didn’t even live together and all of it was years ago. So make me sleep on the couch, and stop bringing work home or have Margret not schedule meetings past a certain time or whatever it is you think I am doing that moves you down the list but God, Donna, don’t _leave me_.”

“Josh,” she said in the tone that made him want to leap wide desks and hold her. 

“Please, Donna, just…”

“This is what I was talking about. You need me but you don’t _want_ me.” _Do not mentions the boobs; shut up about the boobs._ “Remember when I came to ask you for a job and you said you missed me every day? You walk all of 90 seconds, a hundred percent indoors, four times a day because one, Margret wants you to get more exercise and two, because you miss me. I know you like talking to me Josh—for eight years I don’t think I heard you shut up for more than four minutes in a row unless you weren’t conscious. But it didn’t seem to take a whole lot for you to forget about me and be lip-locked with Amy Gardner again. So… I know you want to spend time with me. We did nothing but spend time together for nearly a decade though and you never once kissed me with any real intention. Sure I got the occasional hug that was a little too long, a whole lot of lingering stares, and a couple of chaste kisses on the cheek for the holy days of holy days—elections—but one late night meeting with Amy and you’re too confused to keep from kissing her? What does that say to you Josh? Because I think in any court of law it says that you’re not in this.”

“Well, first of all, a court—”

“Oh, shut up.” Okay, clearly not in the banter place yet. 

“Okay there Blavatsky, lay it on me. What are the cards telling you?” which he could tell was the wrong tone as soon as it was out of his mouth. Also, Donna’s mouth hardened and she launched into whatever treatise she’d been preparing on what was wrong with him in their relationship—Mandy had been pretty fond of these so Josh knew he should just keep his head down and let her say her piece.

“Exactly, Josh. Thank you for making my point. You like to talk to me, at me, you find my witticisms mockable and quirky and you have since the day we met and most of the time that’s fine because it goes both ways. But—like I said—you saw I wanted more and you didn’t. And over time I think you felt guiltier and guiltier for taking advantage of my affection for you and you add to that your recovery and Gaza and my recovery and my quitting and you not being able to—in your bizarre Josh logic—hire me and the amount of guilt you probably felt could have filled the Marianas Trench. Which means the amount of relief you had to feel when we started getting our rhythm back must have been like a tab of E, but I was still in love with you and you were still sort of attracted to me and we were doing so well in the polls and it all kind of fell together. I bet you were so determined not to fall back into the Marianas by breaking it off that you just kept going along until suddenly Amy was in your office and breaking up with the artist. Suddenly you saw a chance to win—and I know how much you like to win. And then you remembered me and you felt guilty and that right there is the Josh Lyman section of Hell. Choose A and win! But also feel horribly guilty forever. Choose B and lose but mostly only warm fuzzy friendship. You chose A and nobody who has read your bio blurb is at all surprised. Clearly I wasn’t. Hurt but not surprised.”

“So less Blavatsky and more Keyworth.” He felt like that trench was inside him only not filled with ocean water but empty and cavernous. “You think I only love you because I’d feel guilty if I didn’t?”

“No Josh. I know you love me. You pretend to be _in love_ with _me_ because if you didn’t you might have to go back to feeling as guilty as you did that day in your campaign office.”

He felt the trench slowly expanding, taking up more and more of his insides. 

“I’ve got a meeting, a real one, I need to prepare for, and I am sure Margret didn’t approve this little mission today so she’s probably going nuts trying to find you. You should go.”

She wanted him to leave. She’d left him three times and now she wanted him to leave her alone. With or without Amy. Amy wasn’t the problem. He was, his love, whatever because it wasn’t strong enough or deep enough or _in_ enough.

He didn’t remember rising or leaving or getting back to his desk but apparently he had. He wasn’t really sure what he did the rest of the day but it probably wasn’t recommend the launching of nukes or telling off people. Margret kept him on a pretty short leash. 

***

“Okay,” she told Ioli as much as herself, “we didn’t catch their little plot. There was a lull and they seemed to be acting like adults, but next time we won’t be fooled, Ioli. Next time we will one hundred percent remember that we are dealing with large children, some of whom become pouty teenagers incapable of a single homework assignment and who stop participating in class entirely.” And of course Margret was stuck with _that_ one. “We should probably see what we can do to make sure they aren’t even entering and exiting the building around the same times, and I’ll have to double check Donna’s appointments just because there are so many old friends they could use to try this again. Maybe you can see if the First Lady might be interested in a diplomatic mission to some place like Somalia or Eritrea or Sudan…you know… for the malaria thing.”


	6. Cosmological Constant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cosmological Constant (A term added by Albert Einstein as a modification to his original theory of general relativity, in order to balance the attractive force of gravity and achieve a static or stationary universe. -https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/glossary.html)

Margret had put in a call that first day, but when he’d gone spacy she’d called again. It wasn’t long before there had been a discreet ride from the airport. 

Things couldn’t be allowed to stand the way they were. The whole White House was feeling it. The First Lady and President cast each other worried glances and tried to evade breaking what they felt was the confidence of a friend. Sam looked like the Beave when it was raining out, and Lou just kept haranguing anyone close enough about anything that came to mind. Josh trudged—that was the only descriptions for it. He trudged through his day from meeting to meeting, from meal to meal. Donna was quiet, no sidebars, no trivia, just a lot of work at her desk. 

*** 

“Well Josh, your office has certainly grown. What kind of fertilizer are you using?”

Stanley wasn’t really worried until he realized the entirety of Josh’s reaction was to look up at him and go back to reading from the binder on his desk. 

“What are you doing here?” Josh asked eventually, more evenly toned than was common for him. 

“I was in town—there’s this show at the Folger—and I thought I’d come by.”

“Oh,” he weakly returned, accepting. 

“Josh, do you remember talking to me a couple days ago?”

“I…” The level of spooked now was a bit more in character. “Stanley—”

“It was only a minute, ninety seconds max. You picked up the phone said, ‘Fine, how are you?’ and rambled about some meeting and hung up.”

“That was you?”

“That was a lot of people, Josh. Margret said that it was like that the whole afternoon and she stopped putting calls through to you.”

“Interviewing my friends again, Doc?”

“Just the one. She’s pretty worried, said she doesn’t know how to stop it from getting worse this time so we really couldn’t wait for more symptoms to present themselves.”

“I’m not having an episode.”

“Okay.”

“You’re still here.”

“Well, like I said, there’s this thing at the Folger and I thought I’d come by. ‘Cause Margret’s pretty worried your schedule looks wide open today. Let’s say we catch up.”

“Stanley…” Josh’s head landed in his hands and after a moment he looked back up, tired but not spooked. 

“Why is Margret holding all your calls, canceling your meetings, and calling me Josh? This is a formidable woman. She can usually take you.”

“I don’t know.”

“I thought we agreed not to lie to each other anymore.”

“I don’t, she didn’t tell me why she’s worried.”

“Okay, but you have some ideas, right? Why were you so out of it you don’t recall who you talked to on the phone a couple days ago?”

“I… Donna.”

“You talked to Donna on the phone?”

“No. Margret’s worried because Donna broke,” he cleared his throat. “She broke it off and moved out.” Josh heaved himself out of his chair and came around the other side. Stanley moved with him to the sitting area. 

“Why did Donna break up with you, Josh?”

“I don’t know, Donna Logic.”

“Oh, well,” Stanley, who had yet to take a new seat, took off his coat and rubbed his hands together before making a show of getting comfortable in one of the arm chairs. “What?” he asked when he saw Josh’s horrified face. “I told you, you’re too easy for me.”

“But Donna’s not? You’re telling me my girlfriend is a nut job?”

“No Josh, I’m telling you she is both smarter and more perceptive, and she gets you on a level that I find fascinating. She’d have made a heck of a psychologist if she thought all of her patients were Josh Lymans.”

“I don’t know what to do with that statement.”

“Good. It means I get to start. Donna broke up with you?”

“Yes.”

“Donna gave you reasons? Laid out the logic of it?”

“Twice actually, though it turned out the first time she left out quite a bit.”

“Okay, so let’s go with totality of Donna’s argument. What is she basing her decision on?”

“That I am a guilt-ridden narcissist.”

“I have a hard time believe Donna said that.”

“You said the totality of her argument and that is it.” Josh had twisted his fingers together and was swinging them between his knees in a fashion that spoke of his more usual energy levels. “See, I—according to the light of my life—felt so guilty over her almost dying in Gaza and then not being able to give her a job on the Santos campaign that when she got a job with us anyway and we started having sex—in order to avoid having to feel guilty for breaking up with her—I just pretended that I was in love with her. Because I am apparently not—or so says Donna.”

“You felt guilty about Gaza?”

“She almost died! I sent her there and she almost died.” Josh’s head was in his hands again but his tone bespoke of the look on his face. “She has this scar, and sometimes I think she almost lost the rest of her leg. I mean that could have been it. Even if she hadn’t died that could have been where they had to amputate from. Or what if the embolism hadn’t been caught, she could have laid there like a vegetable in Germany because of me.”

“So you do feel guilt.”

“God, yes!” And panic too from the sound of it.

“Okay, but Donna’s alive and that scar on her leg is just a scar. She walks around this building on her own two feet every day and since you didn’t plant the bomb and you didn’t tell anybody to I think you should let go of that.”

“Stanley,” his head popping up.

“But I also think,” Stanley, held out a hand to stave off the interruption—or eruption, since this was Josh Lyman— “you should let go of the guilt you feel about a lot of things including surviving a bullet wound. Donna isn’t upset because you feel guilty Josh. She knows you well enough to have seen that the guilt is part of who you are. It’s part of why you make the choices you make and how you treat the people around you. What do you think about the argument that you are staying with her to avoid more guilt?”

“I think it’s crap,” Josh said around the hand on his chin.

“That’s a very compelling argument, yes; I can see why you are annoyed at her for not moving back in.” Stanley often tried to avoid irony with patients, a person who had a hard time hearing your voice over the demons inside would have an even harder time parsing tone and sense of humor—Lyman wasn’t usually one of those patients; he ate irony three means a day. 

“Stanley. I know that. Okay? I know that it’s a dumpkis reason, but I can’t come up with anything other than the absolute certainty that I love her.”

“Okay, that’s okay. Did she say she doesn’t think you love her?”

“No, Stanley, really, I took debate at Harvard and trial law at Yale; I have covered a lot of this ground.”

“Well, I don’t actually read minds, Josh, so catch me up.” While this statement had no irony, Josh—with his irony rich diet—would certainly read it as such. A flat dry tone could convince this patient just about anything was sarcasm.

“Fine.” Josh tipped his head back over the edge of the chair and let it hang there. “Donna says she doesn’t doubt that I love her or find her attractive in a ‘girl-next-door’ way but that I am not in love with her beca—”

“Josh?”

“Because it took me eight years to kiss her. And when she juxtaposes that with this stupid thing that happened with Amy…”

“Amy?”

“Amy Gardner, Director of Legislative Affairs and a bunch of stuff before that, and we were at Yale together.”

“So you’ve known her for a long time?”

“Yeah, on and off.”

“And is Donna’s point that it took eight years with her and no years with Amy Gardner?”

“Mostly,” Josh sat back up. “Mostly that but also Amy and I had a late meeting the other day and she kissed me and it was stupid and it wasn’t about me, it was about this loser who asked her to marry him—always freaks her out—and Donna was understandably very upset.”

“And you?”

“What?”

“How did you feel about Amy kissing you?”

“Very upset.”

“I ask because that didn’t enter into your description,” Stanley clarified which was a way of restating the question to get a deeper answer.

“I am a little more concerned with the problems down the line. And I have already,” he waved a hand in the air, “processed that one or whatever you call it. I didn’t want _her_ , even if Donna won’t…. It’s not like I am gonna go running to Amy and try to pick up with the merry-go-round of sex and war—it was exhausting five years ago; I don’t have that kind of time.”

“Well Josh,” Stanley to a long look around the room to help his point. “We make the time for things we want.”

“I know! I used that argument with Donna. When Amy and I were actually together and Amy was in the East Wing I was, like, never over there, but I am in Donna’s office as many times a day as I can find excuses for—and I gotta tell ya Stanley, I come up with some pretty flimsy excuses.”

Stanley smiled, “What’d she say?”

“That I only do that because I am used to her being two feet outside my office.”

“Are you?”

“I am used to her being two inches away in bed so personally I think her argument could have been stronger. She wasn’t bringing her A game. Mostly because her B Game is that I am too guilt-ridden,” Josh flailed around a bit. “to realize that what I feel when I walk into our apartment and see her barefoot on the couch is relief and not, you know,” he put his hand into his hair and let his head hang forwards this time, “romance.”

“Are you in love with her, Josh?”

“For probably about ten years now.”

“Have you told her that?”

“She’d just say that it was friendship and mild attraction because Mandy, and Cliff, and Amy, and Jack, and… if I was in love with her all that time how come didn’t I give in and kiss her before that day in Florida.”

“So why didn’t you?”

“It was ten years; there were a lot of different reasons at different times and you know for the first couple I probably wouldn’t have been kissing her so much because I couldn’t not kiss her any more but because she was beautiful and smart and there.”

“So when did you really fall in love with her?”

“I don’t know. I just remember these moments of blinding clarity or a sense of …like… boggy ground beneath my feet.”

“What do you mean ‘boggy ground beneath [your] feet?’”

“There was this one Christmas, she was with Commander Wonderful and he was taking her to this… _place_ for some romantic holiday with no White House work for either of them for maybe a whole twenty-four hours. But Leo and the President… There was this impossible task and she offered to help for a little while. She was basically snowed in and trying to cover that she thought I’d planned it so I wouldn’t have to go without her—which okay, yes, I did sometimes but it was the White House and we were never really without a bajillion other things to be doing so it wasn’t like she _wasn’t_ needed or didn’t have important work to be doing but this one time it wasn’t on me. I had actually done a good job not throwing a wrench in her relationship with this… guy. But Leo… he realized that we were weren’t going to create peace in the Middle East for Christmas and got her a lift—literally, on a news chopper—and when I realized she was gone, that I wasn’t going to spend Christmas Eve or Christmas day with her. I guess I felt like a kid who’d watched his parents give the puppy under the tree to someone else. And objectively, the place that knew it looked like I’d tried to sabotage Donna’s romantic getaway looked down to notice that my feet were suddenly deeper into the bog. Or maybe not so suddenly; maybe I was constantly sinking and I didn’t notice.”

“This is all very interesting Josh, really. I do not think you see it, but sometimes your turns of phrase are very telling.”

“What? You think me seeing a relationship with her as sinking into a bog means that I am too guilty to really be in love with her?”

“No, no Josh, I think it means that you felt you couldn’t escape your feelings for her even though you felt like being they were probably a bad move and were trying to fight them.”

“Yeah.”

“Why was it a bad move, Josh? That’s not Donna’s concern but I watched her worry about you; the look on her face more than a few years ago and the look on Margret’s today… they aren’t very alike. You could have gotten this relationship, which has helped you be possibly the least wacky—the professional word for it, I assure you—that I have ever seen you. Maybe not the first few years, or when she was with whomever this Commander was but later, why didn’t you? Why didn’t one of those… ‘moments of blinding clarity’ tip the scale?”

“Timing really. She’d be with somebody, I’d be with somebody, there’d be some crisis and… you know, the ever present threat of the conservative press calling her a whore in print and on talk TV,” he said through some impressively clenched teeth. 

Stanley nodded, “Why haven’t you told her any of that?”

“Because I don’t have proof of any of it. It’s not like your brain prints receipts: ‘One fantasy of Jack Reese being strangled by the thirteen buttons on his pants;’ ‘One jealous rage that Cliff Calley got a second date that ended with him being alone in her bedroom;’ ‘One fit of tears, choked back, because Donna wasn’t disgusted by the two massive wounds on my chest she’d just freshly bandaged.’ The list goes on for a while, Stan.”

“And you think that to Donna your word is not good enough that these were thoughts and feelings you have had all along?”

“Not if she’s just going to keep waving them away as self-delusions.”

“That does sound like a problem. Let me know when you’ve got it figured out,” he said leaning over to pat Josh’s knee before he rose to put his jacket back on.

“What? That’s it? No grand pronouncement on the state of my psyche?”

“I wasn’t here about the state of your psyche, Josh. I was in town, I thought I’d come by.”

“You just happened to be in town hours after Margret tells you I have no idea who I talked to on the phone yesterday?”

“I keep telling you, you’re not a hard enough case for me. Donna Moss, now there is an interesting mind.”

“You’re telling me!” he called as Stanley stepped through the door to the front office and waved good bye. 

Margret breathed a sigh of relief and slowly the tension throughout the building loosened a few notches. 

*** 

Her hands were red from where she’d been clenching them together. She kept trying to stop but Donna’d run out of her office empty handed for maybe the first time ever the second she’d been notified that Dr. Stanley Keyworth had checked in at the west entrance. The longer she waited the more terrified she got. She wasn’t sure where he’d be coming from—Josh’s office? Or were they trying to make it look less like Josh needed a shrink and he’d be coming from the mural room? Or was it really bad and he’d be spending hours interviewing in a room tucked away from the noise of the building?—so her eyes just kept darting around. She still found Stanley before he found her and she watched him try to hide the expression on his face when he spotted her. 

“Is he okay?” she blurted as soon as she thought they were close enough to keep the conversation low.

“Donna, how nice to see you again,” he said in his soft warm tones. “Let’s sit for a minute, catch up.”

_Oh, God_ , he was covering with pleasantries so no one would figure out how bad it was. 

“Is he hurt?”

“Donna, Josh seemed uninjured while I was speaking with him—”

“Seemed?”

“—and like he could use a good night’s rest but nothing stuck out to me as a real cause for worry. Really. How are you?”

“Josh is fine?”

“I don’t know that I would say that; he is still Josh after all and he told me that his personal life has changed quite a bit in the last week. So I ask again, how are you?”

Bursting into tears on your ex’s shrink’s shoulder was probably not the way to go with this one.

“Donna,” he put a hand on top of hers—they were winched together again, “what Josh and I talk about is private; you know that.”

She nodded, because she did. She’d asked him—very diplomatically—if he could tell her stuff so she knew how to better help Josh. Stanley had said—also very diplomatically—no. 

“He’s hurting. Everyone in this building can tell you that, even that tour group over there. We can all also tell that you’re hurting.”

_I will not cry on the shrink. I will not cry on shrink._

“You always asked me how you can help Josh, and that’s admirable. But if you had been ragged from trying to manage Josh and his flashbacks would you have been very good at getting him the help he needed? Would you have been the calm friend who took him to the ER?”

She shook her head. They’d been over this bit a few times before. 

“So, how can I help you?”

She shrugged. “Make Josh okay?” she said with tears in her voice. “God, that’s so codependent.”

“A little bit, yeah.”

“So then I made the right choice. I was right to break up with him?”

“I can’t tell you that Donna. Do you think you were right to break up with him?”

“Sometimes. It hurt so much, knowing that he’d stayed to spend time with her after the work was done and it hurt worse when he tasted like her lip gloss. But I know that I’ll forgive that. It probably wouldn’t even be hard but what about the next time he kisses her or sleeps with her or someone else or I can see that old familiar look on his face and tell that he wants to? What do they call it? Death by a thousand cuts?” 

Stanley nodded.

“I’ve already got a couple hundred. How many more until I end up like Mandy and just want to bludgeon him instead of help him when he’s hurting?”

“I don’t know. There’s no magic number. Have you guys ever really talked about that time?”

“What time? Mandy? God, neither of us want to think about her.”

“Yes, but not just that. You two were close for a long time. You had a very intimate friendship but there was a lot that you weren’t saying to each other. It sounds like there is still a lot of those old secrets between you.”

“Not really, I mean I’ve told Josh that I was a sap who was at least half in love with him the whole time.”

“Okay, but it sounds like you’re glazing over a lot and that’s where those hundreds of cuts fester, Donna. Josh has got a lot that are about you and that time but he also has a lot that have nothing to do with your history together.”

“His sister,” she said, nodding and thinking about Josh’s reactions to the deaths and infirmities of his loved ones. 

“All of them make Josh who he is just as all of yours make you the indomitable Donna Moss.” He smiled at her and continued, “But for any relationship to grow deeper and closer with time some of those cuts need to heal. I’ll tell you a secret. Everyone who lives a real life will suffer thousands of those little cuts, maybe millions, but the thing is how many of them you have at any one time, how quickly you heal. I have seen the kind of healing you and Josh Lyman are capable of when you put your minds to it. But it sounds like what both of you have to decide is if you want to heal those old wounds, Mandy—was it?—Jack, Amy, who and whatever else from your past that makes you think he’ll sleep with someone else, whatever builds those walls between the love you feel for each other and the rest of your hearts.”

She didn’t know what to say—as much as she wanted to know what Josh had said that Stanley knew about Jack, what Josh had said about what happened with Amy—she didn’t know if she could hold her younger self out to Josh to reject again. She’d put her heart on her sleeve so often in those early days and sometimes he would just…

“Look, I’ve got to go—there’s this thing at the Folger—but you’ve got my number. I keep telling you people you don’t have to wait until it’s an emergency but no one ever believes me.” She half watched him straighten his coat and leave, a half-smile (gratitude, pleasantry) on her face. 

Sometimes Josh would just… just smack her heart right out of her hand and onto the floor where it would roll around in the dust and fuzz and end up covered in gunk. And not even notice he’d done it.


	7. Neutron Star

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neutron star (A star that has shrunk under its own gravity during a supernova event, so that most of its material has been compressed into neutrons only [the protons and electrons have been crushed together until they merge, leaving only neutrons]. Neutron stars are very hot, quite small [typically 20 to 30 kilometers in diameter], extremely dense, have a very high surface gravity and rotate very fast. - https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/glossary.html)

“Donna,” Sam said, anxious and edgy from within her office, and her head popped up. “Stanley was here?”

She felt her shoulders lower. It wasn’t something new. She’d dealt with this already. 

“It wasn’t that kind of visit. He was here for less than an hour; he said Josh was as fine as he ever is and that the rest of his conversation was private. The usual. He said he wasn’t worried.”

“Right,” Sam exhaled but his shoulders didn’t come down and his eyebrows were frighteningly close to his hair line. “Yeah, I’m still worried. I’m not a professional or anything but sometimes those people get it wrong and Josh—and Donna this really isn’t a dig or me being upset with you—he’s been a mess since you walked out on him and there has been little to nothing anyone has been able to do to jolt him out of it.”

“I know.” And she did, she knew. But it would be pretty ridiculous for her to call Josh on his guilt only to get back together with him out of her own fear.

“I’m sorry. I’m not… I’m not blaming you. God knows in the Relationship Olympics Josh is like…” Sam looked around like he was casting about in his mind for a strong, or at least not terrible, end to the metaphor. “Well, he’d never make any team from anywhere. And you—”

“Watch it, Pretty Boy.”

Sam smiled. “What I mean is if there was a mistake, nobody thinks it was you who made it, and since this is you guys nobody thinks it wasn’t major. I mean, if it was just Josh leaving the cap off the tooth paste or not picking up his socks or doing the dishes—”

“All of which his is indeed terrible at.”

“—you’d torture him, probably by putting tooth paste in his socks or something, but you wouldn’t move out and refuse to talk to him.”

“He hasn’t told you anything? Nothing about what happened?”

“You know Josh,” Sam said, sitting down in the chair Josh had been in when she said he’d let his guilt convince him he was in love with her. “He’s too busy beating himself up with it, and if he said it out loud somebody might say the right thing and he’d feel better and then where would he be?”

“Yeah,” the smile on her face was a rictus next to Sam’s. 

“I did get him to tell me, in a drunken, exhausted stupor, that you thought he didn’t love you enough. I told him it was crazy. It is crazy, right? You know that man would commit felonies for you. Half the time I think he got Santos elected to get _you_ back in the White House where he’d be able to argue with you again. Love isn’t even a strong enough word for it Donna.”

She had to close her eyes against the earnestness on his face because this was going to be like kicking a puppy—a very large puppy. “Sam,” she sighed, “he kissed Amy.”

“No.” Sam pushed himself back in the chair as though he was blown back by the force of his disbelief. “I do not believe that for a second. There is no way Josh would kiss Amy. That Amy would kiss him and he might be befuddled and not push her away, okay, yes, that is possible, but never, _never, Donna_ , would Josh kiss Amy.”

“He’s kissed her before, Sam. A lot. I even saw it happen with my own eyes—there’s not enough bleach for that kind of thing, Sam.”

“But that was only because he couldn’t kiss you! Donna. Come on. There’s no way.”

“You want details, Sam, you’re going to have to go to the source. He wasn’t very forth coming about it and, to be honest, I know just about all the details I can stand.”

“Okay, say he did kiss her, for whatever reason, a mistake. That’s it? All that time waiting to be together; how happy you’ve been, he’s been for the last two years; it’s all just out the window? Isn’t that a little bit throwing out the baby with the bathwater?”

“What if it happens again? And again after that and soon he’s sleeping with her? What if it keeps happening because what he really wants is Amy, or someone like her?”

“I don’t know how we have arrived at this moment,” Sam said as if it had just been announced that the U.S. was firing nuclear warheads at itself, “but I am suddenly questioning your intelligence.”

“Sam.”

“If he wanted Amy, he would be with Amy. He would have been with Amy one single time and not had to get back together ten and some odd times like some miserable redux of Mandy only with less parking tickets. He certainly wouldn’t have walked around like she barely existed while she was in the same administration for two years. Donna. I love you… like friend-love, really, actually let’s push that to brotherly affection. I love you like a brother and you are six different kinds of smart but sometimes when it comes to Josh I think you got hit by the dumb stick.”

“‘The dumb stick,’” she laughed at him. 

“You know what I mean.” He continued, “How anybody can know the whirlwind of whackadoo that is my best friend as well as you do but still not have been able to see how in love with you he was isn’t working with full deck is all I am saying.”

“Whirlwind of whackadoo?”

“Yeah, don’t tell Toby. Don’t every tell Toby.”

*** 

“If you don’t marry that woman,” boomed Sam’s voice into his office so unexpectedly that Josh fell out of his chair, “the second she takes your miserable hide back I will never speak to you again.”

“Okay,” he said looking at his best friend from the floor. 

Sam nodded like he’d made some earth-shattering pronouncement and to ignore it would cast damnation upon all Josh’s kin. It was weird, even for Sam, and Josh had no idea what had happened but… if Sam had been talking about Donna—and of course he was talking about Donna—then that meant Sam had been talking _to_ Donna which meant that Donna was softening. Because Sam wouldn’t come in and get Josh’s hopes up like that if he knew Donna was holding firm. 

It didn’t take much encouragement—not that many people would have seen Sam’s behavior as encouragement—to finagle his way up into the East Wing offices—he wasn’t kidding about the flimsy excuses; any dream would do—so that he was rapping a knuckle on Donna’s open door in the quiet early evening of their day (usually about 8:00). When she looked up and saw it was him a wall of pain didn’t slam down on her face so he took that as more encouragement. “Can I come in?”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“Nope.”

“What do you want, Josh?” And that statement right there was about four more bits of encouragement.

“I…ah… I was hoping we could talk.”

“We are.”

“About us. And the appointment rules strictly state that a business reason has to be given and I do not have one. The topic of conversation definitely does not relate to any form of Santos Administration business.”

“Then what does it relate to?”

“That’s harder to explain.”

“Why?”

“Stanley came by,” he said, still by the door and hoping she’d notice he was abiding her wishes by not entering—well, technically he was over the threshold but not by much—without express permission.

“And that makes it difficult to explain how?” she said without looking up at him.

“He asks all these questions, you know, like constantly. I don’t think I have ever heard him go a full minute of talking without at least two questions.”

“It is part of his job, Josh.” She still hadn’t noticed that he wasn’t fully entering her office, that he was trying to respect her boundaries.

“Yeah, still.” She looked up just as he shrugged and thought he might have to go further in to catch her eye line. 

“Right,” she said after a couple beats of them just looking across the room at each other, “why does that make it difficult to explain?”

“He asked questions and I was trying to figure out the answers, did a lot of thinking,” he lifted a shoulder at her—what, he knows she likes his shoulders; just wait until he rolls up his sleeves and crosses his arms in a minute, she’s gonna go cross-eyed.

“So you didn’t already know the answers to his questions.”

“They aren’t the yes/no type,” Josh continued. “He is staunchly against multiple choice. If your answer doesn’t come in paragraph form, he just thinks you’re deflecting and asks it again. He’s worse than my sixth grade English teacher.”

“What did he ask?” Donna did not look away at her work anymore but spent more time locking eyes with him.

“Stuff about you mostly.”

“Me?” _And here it comes ladies and ladies: a delft flick of the wrist and one button is undone, then the other._

“Yeah, you.” _And now for the artfully tousled folds._

“What about me?” Donna asked followed by a lick of her lower lip.

“You know, stuff.” _We have a crossed slouch! But will the prey succumb to the trap?_

“Stuff that makes it difficult to explain?” She swallowed.

“Yeah.” _That’s right; come to papa—which is actually kind of gross now (stupid boobs—well, not stupid)._

“What, did he ask where in Wisconsin I was from and you said, ‘She’s actually Canadian?’” Her lips tightened and her eyebrows rose.

“I would have, yes, but he didn’t ask that.”

“So what did he ask already, Joshua?” She rolled her eyes but they landed right back on his arms.

“He asked when I really fell in love with you.”

“Oh.” At that her eyes drifted away again, not a good sign.

“This is the place where you ask me what my answer was.”

“Josh…” she started.

“Come on, Donna, ask.”

“What did you tell him?” She swallowed again.

“That I wasn’t sure because there had been these moments of blinding clarity over the many, many years but—from that first day—I’ve just had this feeling that I was being pulled in deeper and deeper. I didn’t know what it was at the time; I could only tell that it was, is, inescapable.”

“Josh—”

“And so I’ve been thinking back over those moments where I would have—where I should have given in and just kissed you.” He watched her swallow yet again and uncrossed his arms, put his hands deep in his pockets so he wouldn’t reach for her.

“Why didn’t you?”

“Which time?”

“All of them, any of them.”

“Donna, there’s eight years of events here to pick from. Narrow it down.”

“Fine. The Inauguration,” she chose with her face, her eyes looking straight at him, defiant.

“Which one?” And there he could tell he’d thrown her for a loop because the first Inaugural had not been one of those nights when they were centimeters from falling into each other because the Administration was already behind the ball and Mandy was ranting at him and Donna was just calmly putting out fires and they had barely had the chance to look each other in the face all night.

“The second.”

That damn quote. “Why didn’t I kiss you that night?”

“Yeah, Wild Thing,” he smiled at her memory—elephants had nothing on Donnatella Moss, “why did you make me sit in your lap in the cab and not kiss me before the night was over?”

He had to clear his throat to focus on the question and not his preoccupation during the cab ride. “Well, you had a boyfriend whose military career you were trying to insulate from his colossal misunderstanding of the job of reporters. And who I was pretty sure could beat me up.”

“Who had just gotten transferred to Aviano!”

“You’re Italian; maybe you were gonna—”

“My _mother_ is Italian.”

“—do the long distance thing. I didn’t know. You loved him enough to cover his ass when it should have been in a sling.”

“So you didn’t kiss me because you were respecting my relationship with a guy you still abhor six years later? What about Amy’s relationship with Vance? Didn’t that deserve some respect?”

“First of all, I think by being the one to encourage Jack to ask you out I get points from the top for respecting that you liked him… which… whatever. And second Amy kissed _me_ ; I have had zero problems respecting her relationship with Vance—aside from the required crack about his ‘art’—but he proposed and apparently she went nuts.”

“Wait, Vance proposed? And so she kissed you?”

He shrugged; Amy Logic was never his strong suit—his inability to grasp it had cost him dearly, nearly his job and now Donna (possibly permanently)—and as long as she wasn’t trying to railroad his agenda he stayed as far away as he could manage. “She’s got some hang ups.”

“I’ll say.” Donna fidgeted a minute. “So, Jack.”

“I had to keep imagining him being strangled by those damn dress pants in order to keep my hands off you all night. You were dancing with Will, who was still in shock over the whole deputy thing, and this light from behind you hit your hair and your dress and for maybe a whole thirty seconds I couldn’t breathe.”

“So you’re saying you noticed I looked hot?”

“Yes, Donna you were hot, are hot,” he said leaning up against the wall differently, trying to save his knees a little from standing in one place for the maybe three hours it was going to take to review enough of his past infatuations with her to convince her to take him back. “But that wasn’t why I couldn’t look away.”

“Oh?”

“Because it hit me that it was the sight I wanted to be seeing for maybe the rest of my life and I didn’t cross that ballroom and kiss the breath right out of you because if you still wanted Jack and I fucked it up I was never going to get that. I was never going to get to watch the light hit you ever again, let alone the rest of my life. And that night we deployed to Kundu and Sam’s election, and…” he shrugged, it was the long slog of events that fell like rain in the White House and meant sitting down to pick the best time to date your assistant never really presented itself (and really the idea that it might go wrong, as all of his relationships did—horribly and this time with the added belp of the right wing press—and he’d lose her forever got in on the fun too).

She tipped her head back against her chair and sighed. Josh looked at her neck and was grateful that she was at least still letting him watch her even if it had to be across her cavern of an office. “That’s a good answer.”

He smiled a little and watched her. He’d stand there trying to convince her for a week as long as he wasn’t needed in the Sit Room, if that’s what it took. The silence dragged on and he had to literally bite his tongue to keep from asking _Good enough?_ out loud. 

“How long are you gonna stand there like a putz?” She asked, still looking at the ceiling.

“How long are you gonna let me?” Because she was the deciding factor. Maybe he had been before, he’d been the one who had to make the call to move out of the friend/boss-space in to the one where he didn’t have to hide that he was watching her, where he didn’t always have to bury his hands in the loose change in his pockets and cling to the lining to keep from touching her but she was the one who had maneuvered them once they did. She got him into bed, she showed up at his apartment, she decided that they had to have separate jobs, she told him they were going to his mother’s for Thanksgiving. And that was fine with him—he was pretty terrible at figuring out when and how all those steps should be initiated—his life was always better when she was basically in charge of it and as a reward he got to watch her. 

“I haven’t decided, you stalker.” Insults were a good sign. Some people think of food as terms of endearment (sweetie, honey, pumpkin)—though to him that had always seemed a little cannibalistic and creepy—but if Donna was murmuring middle schooler jibes at him all was right with his world… or getting closer to it.

“Well, hurry it up, would ya? I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I have a pretty important job,” he said smiling at her.

When she turned her head to glare at him with a low, “Josh,” of warning he was still smiling, still leaning against the wall just inside her door with his hands in his pockets. _Priorities that, Donnatella_. Because he was just as “tuned” to her as she was to him he could tell her breathing had gotten shallow. Their eyes locked for a minute before she turned away and stood up—not ready to say bygones then. “What do you want?”

“You.”

“No, I mean why are you here?”

“You.”

“Josh—”

“Donna, I have braved the snowy streets of DC in a cab, a Palestinian spy mission in Germany, hospitals and operating rooms, Karen Cahill, Leo, the President, and my mother, _yours_ , to be where you are so don’t ever tell me that right next you isn’t why I’m here.”

“Damn it,” she muttered, crossing her arms and resting a hip on the edge of her desk. “That was good.”

“Yeah?”

“Sam levels of good.”

“Really?” _You stay on this wall, Joshua Lyman. Do not walk over and touch her_.

“Sam write it?” She uncrossed her arms and pushed around a folder.

“He wrote something but I tripped over chair a couple days ago and forgot every word he’d made me memorize.” He shrugged and watched her chew on her thumbnail, something she only did to hide a reaction. _Come on, Donna, just a little bit further_.

She broke her eyes away from him again and he swallowed a groan. She was fighting this hard. Maybe too hard. Maybe she couldn’t make the jump. Maybe he’d waited too long, and he’d burned up too many second chances delaying this in the first place and he’d never get her back over the line again.

“So then why Florida?”

“What?” he might have been a little distracted by the spiraling panic.

“Why did you kiss me in Florida? If you’d been able to hold yourself back for eight years why did the dam burst in Florida?”

“I… We weren’t in the White House, the President wasn’t somewhere in the room and there were no press cameras. You weren’t seeing anybody, right? I mean I’d barely been naked for the six months before that so I certainly wasn’t seeing anybody. You weren’t though. Right?” Because suddenly it was a very real possibility in his mind. What if she’d been with Will, or some junket gomer?

Her lips quirked up and she shook her head ever so slightly. “No, I wasn’t. But, really? The press was on your checklist?”

“Of course they were Donna; you weren’t the only one to suspect I maybe kinda had a thing for my assistant… which… wasn’t wholly untrue. You can’t tell me you didn’t hear the rumors? I mean, Jesus, Joey Lucas even…”

“What about Joey Lucas?”

“That damn night we were stuck at the polling center. Later she… she said that if she polled a hundred Donna’s I’d misinterpret the results because I was in denial.”

“She said that?”

“In a way longer story, yeah.” He watched her watching him for a minute. “Anyway, all the press needed was hard evidence that I was having an inappropriate affair with my assistant and—God, especially after the MS—it would have… Let’s just say the conservative and Christian right, their press, they would have had a field day.”

“Leo and the President, wouldn’t they have stood behind you?

“‘The White House does not comment on the personal lives of its staff.’ I might have kept my job but the minute I ceased to be effective at it my career would have ended and yours…” He couldn’t look at her and say it, the voices of all the Hafleys and Jacobs and Marshes of the world ringing in his ears. He looked at the floor, the door, to see what had kept her interest on the ceiling so long before.

“What about mine?”

“You wouldn’t have been able to get a respectable job waiting tables in DC, Wisconsin, or anywhere they have CNN for years.” Very rarely had saying so few words taken all the air in his lungs. She was too quiet though, and so he had to look at her, check to see if she was okay.

“Oh,” she said eventually, her voice a little hollow. “Oh,” she said again after a few beats as he watched her face harden. “You didn’t kiss me because Mary Marsh would have rattled her cauldron.” And that tone? Frightened him and turned him on—theirs was a strange love affair with confrontation. “You made relationship decisions based on how _Mary Marsh_ was going to feel about them? What and because I was so pale and sickly, I couldn’t possibly withstand the ire and vitriol of her cronies?”

“Well, I don’t think there’s any evidence of _that_ in this building.”

“I swear to God Joshua, if you legitimately expect me to believe that you never asked me out because it would set Mary Marsh’s hair on fire but you didn’t think Amy would I will show you a conflagration the likes of which you have never seen.”

“Amy’s parents were childhood friends of the most liberal First Lady since Abigail Adams. Mary Marsh and the whole right wing of the country could stuff it as far as their opinion on any given thing was concerned up to and including their daughter. But I somehow doubt many members of your family would have been talking to you if it came out in the _Sun Prairie Star_ you’d maybe slept your way into a job in a democratic White House. They already wanted to hoist me into a hay baler or something for never letting you take a vacation. I didn’t much like my chances if I got you splashed below the fold of the _New York Times_ as my shiska concubine.” And he’d only just realized that they were both yelling.

“Oh, please. That’s an excuse and you know it.”

“Are you kidding me? Cast your mind back to the day-to-day mess we had on our hands. I had a difficult enough time not getting fired without any of that. One three-minute press conference and I am hearing about a secret plan to fight inflation to this day. People were calling me a political master or a wunderkind and I was treading water for the life of me,” he said as he rolled to his side collapsed against the wall for more support, “and I still couldn’t figure out how to get where I wanted to be so I just kept treading water even though I was frustrated and scared and lonely.” He took a deep breath. “But if I cracked a cheese joke your eyes would light up and it wasn’t so bad. If I swaggered around your desk you’d make fun of my hair and my ego but you’d also have total faith that I could get the funding for under-fives hearing screenings or something and all you’d ask for was a raise you knew I couldn’t give you.”

“Josh,” she said from much closer than she had been since she walked out their door.

So he turned his head and opened his eyes to see her there. Her face was soft and kind and there was love behind her eyes and if he moved at all he would tie himself to her so she could never leave him again. “Donna.”

It was probably the desperation in his voice that had her stepping even closer and raising a hand to his face. He turned into it and that feeling he’d had when he’d first started kissing her returned—what had he called it? His first smack high?—but he was still afraid to scare her off by stepping into her space. 

“Oh, Joshua”—her tone said it all, it was her “You’re a ridiculous putz and for some ungodly reason I love you anyway” tone, so he finally let go of his muscles, and the lining of his pockets, and let his body wrap itself around her—“this can’t ever happen again. I mean it.”

“I know. Don’t worry,” He almost sighed as her hand slid into his hair and pressed him deeper into her shoulder. “I’ll get the Secret Service guys to step into the room whenever I might be alone with a woman who isn’t you. They can tackle anyone whose lips get within two feet of me.”

“While I appreciate the sentiment, that would be stupid, creepy, and incredibly sexist.”

“So that’s a no then to the Secret Service thing?”

“Yeah, a hard no.”

“I want you to trust me, Donna, to trust this.” It killed him a little to pull away but it was only a few inches so he could make sure she believed him. “I don’t ever want you to question how much or in what way I love you Donna. God knows I don’t and if you keep letting me be where you are on a regular basis I promise not to question if you love me either.”

“Damn it,” she said and deliberately frowned at him while dragging the hand in his hair to his cheek. “That was good.”

“Sam levels of good?”

“Josh levels of good.” And her face was serious but her eyes were bright and his world slotted back into place when his lips met hers and he knew the only thing she would taste were the fries he’d had with his salad—he and Margret had a deal—and the nerves he’d been fighting the whole time and whatever else of him she might find there. 

When the kiss finally broke she said, “If you pump your fist in victory right now I am staying on Andy’s couch for another two days.”

“I’m really not letting go any time soon so we may need to look into conference calls.” She was still smiling, still laughing as he kissed her. The kissing went on for a while because—though he _was_ very interested in resuming the sweater research—they were in the White House and to get her home he’d have to let go at least a little and he wasn’t doing that. Maybe in a few days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next is an epilogue.
> 
> Also, can we please talk about how ridiculous Josh's internal monologues are? Boob-sweater dichotomy chart? Nobody? Nobody!


	8. Gamma Ray Burst (Cont.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Epilogue: Gamma Ray Burst (cont.)(The initial burst is usually followed by a longer-lived 'afterglow' emitted at longer wavelengths [X-ray, ultraviolet, optical, infrared and radio]. -https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/glossary.html)

“Can I ask you something?”

“If you ask me that before every question you ask me, we are going to lose years of our lives, Donna. Years,” he emphasized.

“You’re not going to do your ridiculous math to try and figure out how many years are you?” she asked while he moved around her to get the coffee pot from the far end of the counter, kissing her shoulder as he reached past. 

“Not enough time. I have stuff; you know I have stuff.” He never questioned her ability to keep her own schedule, the First Lady’s schedule, and his schedule in her head along with all the other information she enjoyed collecting.

“You’re not late yet. And I still want to ask you my question.”

“Is this a yes/no question? That I have time for, and after I can kiss you for a minute.”

“No, it’s a Stanley question.”

“Okay, then two minutes of action, and you have to ask me later. Deal?” 

He put the travel mug down and had both hands on her, and she knew that no matter what his answer was later that he loved her and he wanted to be with her. That certainty had gone a long way to healing those cuts she and Stanley had once talked about in the west lobby. There were others though and talking about them in the last few months had helped more than either she or Josh could probably explain. “Hmm, what about a minute of kissing here and then I walk you to the car and we have a minute of kissing outside.”

“Toughest negotiator in the biz.”

“Bet your ass.”

*** 

Josh was draped against her reading a briefing that, based on the red piping on the page, she wasn’t supposed to read—and they’d had this conversation, multiple times; the result was always that Josh trusted her to either not read them or to not saying thing about them because he really couldn’t function when he was actively lying to her about this stuff—and sighing repeatedly. That was a pretty clear sign that he was going to be looking for an excuse to close the brief and talk to her. Sure enough Donna was only three more pages into the biography she was vetting for the First Lady’s book list before he tossed it off the edge of the bed.

“What was that Stanley question anyway?”

“Hmm,” she knew perfectly well what he was asking, but it kept his ego in check and made it so it was easier to move about the apartment. 

“This morning, before you walked me out, you had a Stanley question.”

“Yeah.”

“What was it?”

“Oh, sorry, does now meet with your needs? Am I being given leave to be inquisitive?”

“Donna,” he rubbed his eyes, “Just ask me already because I have other plans for before I fall asleep tonight.”

“And what might those be? Are you putting your clothes back on to go meet up with Sam? Is there a Mets game I don’t know about later? Because I don’t see how I can be part of the aforementioned ‘plans’ because I haven’t been consulted on any ‘plans’ for this evening. I may already have ‘plans’ and not the penciled in kind either.”

“Okay,” he said before sitting up, “you asked for it.” He lifted her top to blow a zerbert on her stomach before he moved to straddle her and take her book. She of course half-heartedly countered his moves with indignant squawks until things dissolved into a decent make-out session.

“Ask now Donnatella or I might just go right to sleep,” he said, his voice muffled by her left breast.

“God, you’re a pain,” she said even as he pulled his head out from under her sweater, a grin on his face that rivaled his birthday.

His response was to keep smiling and leave his hands under her clothes.

“Fine, but get down here first.” She spent a few moments arranging them so that he was laying on his side with an arm around her. She wanted to have the option to see his face, and during these conversations he really needed to see hers, or he got ansty and anxious (not a great look on Josh Lyman).

“So?”

“You know the First Lady and I are going to that Rock the Vote thing.”

“Yeah.”

“And I was remembering some of the ones we went to in the past.”

“Yeah.” She could tell he was getting leery of the conversation.

“Do you remember the one just after Indiana? There’d been that terrible bomb at a swim meet and—”

“I remember. It was at Harvard; I remember.”

“It wasn’t. It was at the House of Blues in Cambridge. Not everything in that town is Harvard, you know.”

“Says the woman who lived there when?”

“ _Anyway_ , that morning when I walked in you literally stopped in the middle of a sentence and looked at me like you hadn’t seen me in days even though four hours before was the end of us being together for twenty hours solid.”

“I remember,” he smiled at her the same way he had that morning a little mystified and cheerful. 

“And a few hours later—”

“Donna,” he took his hand from where it had been rubbing her back softly to scrub over his face.

“—you were ignoring my very salient points because Amy had just walked into the room.”

“This isn’t a question.”

“Josh—”

“It’s not!”

“How… How am I supposed to remember that moment, that day and not think of it as you choosing Amy over me? I don’t think you’d do that now. I don’t; I swear Josh, but that stuff happened all the time. You can’t say it was work. You didn’t go over there to talk about business because you didn’t know about Stackhouse yet. Just help me out here because I want to remember that morning and what you said about wanting to be where I was, I want to remember being there with you tonight and not…”

“Donna, I am an asshole. Okay? I did eighty thousand things that hurt you and I’m sorry. I… If it helps at all that day is a really great example of why this is the relationship I want, the one I am in, and why Amy and I never would have worked out—even if there hadn’t been the colossal mind fuck of that I was maybe a little in love with my assistant going on the whole time.”

“What do you mean?”

“That morning you’d knocked my socks off. It had been a horrible day, I’d been miserable to you—and a large slice of the Midwest—and you’d had maybe two hours of sleep in your own bed and you walked in happy to see me and like a daisy and made what was already a pretty good morning better. And yeah, okay, when Amy showed up I thought that my day was going to get even better still, I thought we could put the thing behind us and I was completely wrong. My overall pretty good day went to shit, and I had to come up with a whole new strategy for the Stackhouse problem. Also, the woman I was still telling my mom was my girlfriend was once again someone I didn’t want to talk to because she’d just made my job harder, again. Which, you know, should have been a clue because in all that time we were trying to get home Amy’d heard about our adventures from someone else because it hadn’t even occurred to me to tell her myself. If you think I didn’t regret looking up when I did then…” he sighed. “I don’t know how to answer that question, Donna. I don’t want you to be looking at people in those t-shirts and thinking, ‘Wow, my man’s an ass,’ but,” he shrugged.

She kissed him. “It does help. Thank you for telling me.” His hand was back, brushing hair off her face, shoulder, and drifting down her arm. She smiled a little. “It does help.” She sighed and snuggled in a bit. And then a bit more as his arms wrapped around her. 

“Good, then maybe you can return the favor when somebody wants us to join them for dinner at the Washington Inn.” 

“Deal.” He kissed her forehead and sighed. Then his head did this little series of shifts against hers she had come to realize meant he didn’t want to move but he also didn’t want the lights on any more and he wasn’t sure how to solve the problem. She chuckled quietly and said, “We could get the clapper thing.”

“Donna,” he squeaked, scandalized, “I’m lazy, not tacky.”

“You’re a snob.”

“That too.” He didn’t move. “Ugh, fine!” He moved quickly and Donna tried to dodge his arms as he flung them about to accomplish his task as quickly as possible and then return to his prior position. 

“Goodnight, Donnatella,” he said kissing her forehead again.

“Good night, Joshua,” she kissed the underside of his stubbled jaw where there was a scar from him landing chin-first on a basketball blacktop in grade school. 

*** 

Josh had been sulking for the whole sixty-three minutes he’d been home and if he didn’t come out with what was bothering him soon Donna was going to have to sic his mother on him or hit him over the head with something—maybe both.

She heard a stack of something book-like cascade to the floor followed by a grumble rather than a shuffle of objects which meant whatever her darling boyfriend had knocked over he’d left a mess. “Joshua,” she said in a voice that was both natural and deeper than possibly ever. 

“Later,” he huffed.

“ _Josh_ ,” her voice rose.

“I’ll pick it up later. I need to finish this.” He didn’t look up.

“Okay, but you aren’t finishing; you are throwing the most drawn out temper tantrum I have ever beheld.”

“I am _not_. What do you think I am? A child?” he hollered her direction before he stood and paced around like a trapped cat. 

“No, you are a grown man which is what makes this whole thing so disturbing. Just spit it out.”

“I… You just called me childish,” he said with his voice a few octaves above his “I’m blatantly lying” range.

“I did. And I will continue to think it until you spit out what has you all…” she waved at him, “in a tizzy.”

“Men do not tizzy.” Which wasn’t even really English so she ignored it. “We don’t.”

“Regardless of what you feel it may do to your masculinity, Josh, you are rapidly approaching being in a snit and I still have no idea why. Your options are to tell me—you enormous child—or get over it.” So what if they were yelling? It wasn’t the bad kind of yelling.

“Well, I’m not telling you _now_.”

“Great, pouting. At least it’ll be quieter.” _Damn it_. She watched him forcefully drop his head into his propped up hands and clench his teeth where he sat on the couch, miles away from his work on the dining table. _Damn it_.

She moved quietly to the back of the couch, swung her legs over so that her knees were outside his shoulders and she had full access to rub his neck. She didn’t speak for the first few moments, waiting for his shoulders to relax a bit. “Are you mad at me?”

“A little bit,” he responded.

“What did I do?”

“Other than calling me a baby? Not really anything.”

“I didn’t call you a baby. I implied you were being childish.”

“Is that supposed to be better?”

“Just more accurate. So, if it’s not me, what has got you looking like you want to kick puppies? The President?” He groaned more in response to the knot she’d found in his back than in affirmation. “Sam? Lou? Bram?” All seemingly innocuous responses. “Which is a ridiculous thing to name a baby. Why not just call him BamBam and be done with it?”

“I think his parents had a thing from Brahms.”

“Well then call him Brahms is all I’m saying.” He grunted in half-blissed out accord. “So what is it? Don’t leave me in suspense; who do I punish for ruining our evening of tranquil domesticity?”

He sighed, leaning his head back into her thigh, “Me.”

“We’re mad at you? Other than being a petulant child, I can’t think of a reason to be mad at you.”

“That’s not enough?”

“Well,” she said stroking his brow the way she remembered his mother doing in the hospital, “I’d spend a lot of my time mad at you if it was. _But_ , and it pains me to admit this, you usually have a reason for acting like a petulant child. Who made you nutty today?” she asked and then thought of all those pages with red piping. “Unless you can’t tell me.”

“Cliff Calley asked about you.”

She cast her mind quickly through his schedule, “He was in the White House today?”

“Yeah, 585.”

“And you talked about me?” she asked as he pulled on her ankles and scooted forward to put her truly behind him before pulling her legs into his lap.

“He was all boy scout about it; ‘Hey, how’s Donna these days? She’s doing great things in the East Wing. You must be pretty proud.’”

“The nerve.”

“He was baiting me, trying to throw me off my game by reminding me that he has dirt on us.”

“Possible. It was also possible he was trying to kiss up.”

“To you.” She smiled as she wrapped her arms around his shoulders the way he’d wrapped her legs around his hips.

“Okay, so Cliff asked about me, praised my work and what?”

“Huh?”

“What else? Did he get some sort of major concession from you? Did he list felony indictments?”

“No.” He was tensing up beneath her. So she rubbed his shoulders again.

“Hmmm, I am sensing a Stanley question.”

“I don’t have a Stanley question; it’s just what did you ever see in that guy?” And it was typically Josh to say he didn’t have a question and ask one with the same breath just as it was typical for him to ask a question that wasn’t his real question in the hopes that the answer would cover similar territory. 

“Well, he was nice, funny even—”

“For a republican.”

“—handsome, and actually available which was more than the other guy I was spending a lot of time with so… not wholly unattractive.”

“Donna.”

“I’m not kidding Josh, he was a good guy then as both what happened with my diary and later with Leo can attest, to say nothing of his working for the President but he wasn’t you.”

“Because he’s a republican?”

“No, because he didn’t make fun of my jokes or tease me about my penmanship or look at me like I was floating away on something. I won’t say I wasn’t interested in him. I was interested in you more and I couldn’t have you. I spent a lot of time trying to find someone who could supplant you but it never really worked out very well, as I am sure you will recall.”

“You did date a lot of gomers.”

“So did you.” She could have listed several of them and the most expensive gifts they’d ever given Josh-- _Stupid finical disclosure statements_.

“What is the female of gomer? Gomerette? Gomrette?”

“Bimbo.”

“I doubt the sisterhood is behind that term,” he said, wiggling his head into just the right angle on her shoulder. 

“If there is a gendered synonym then the definitions match, certainly as you used them.”

“Well….” There was a long drawn out pause during which Josh dragged his fingers along her freshly waxed legs worrying one of the patches of fine hairs that would not be removed. “Cliff wants us to go to a thing.”

“He invited us somewhere?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that what you’ve been thinking about? You don’t want to go? You don’t want to go,” she shrugged, “we don’t go.”

“Donna. It would be good for you to go.”

“If it bothers you,” she shrugged, “I won’t go.”

“That’s not fair.”

“It’s not fair to you that I don’t go to an event where we have been invited by a guy I dated nearly a decade ago?”

“No, it’s not fair to you!”

She watched the ceiling a minute. “Okay, you lost me. How do you figure?”

“It bothers you that I have a working relationship with one of my exes.”

“Amy. Yes, that’s fair but mostly because she has shown she has flawed judgement and understanding of the term ‘committed, monogamous relationship.’”

“In dating me?”

“No, in trying to hook up with you while you and she are both in committed, relationships with other people.”

“Not monogamous?”

She sighed, “Ours, but I can’t really speak to the monogamy of hers.”

“Okay, fair. But my point is that it gets to you that she and I continue to work together. We have meetings, e-mails, she and I have to talk to each other regularly, no matter how much I delegate.”

“Well, she is your employee now, which I’m sure annoys the crap out of her so there is that to counter balance it.”

“Anyway, you deal with it. It upsets you but you deal, so it is unfair of me to expect you to run screaming from your ex even though I can’t run screaming from mine.”

“But you want me to run screaming.”

“Like you wouldn’t believe.”

“And that’s what has been stressing you out tonight? Being unfair?”

“I thought you’d say ‘being a Neanderthal.’”

“That too.” She fought the urge to kiss him. “So I should be expecting this invite to hit my office soon?”

“Mine, I’ll have Margret send it up.”

“Well, then I will review it and make a purely professional decision that I expect you to accept if not graciously then at least publically. Deal?”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you,” she said with her face mostly smooshed into his hair.

“I didn’t really think I had a choice but to tell you, but you’re welcome.”

“Oh, you didn’t. I didn’t mean for that. I meant for keeping me from being charged with perjury, for not asking me what was in my diary that I didn’t want congress to read, for not firing me, for still being my friend after. For forgiving me, for loving me even though I—”

He turned and looked at her with wide, concerned, loving eyes. “Always, Donnatella.” He kissed her and she poured out this well of gratitude she still felt that he hadn’t cut her out forever that day. “I was hurt—I couldn’t admit why at the time—but I couldn’t ever not do those things.” They kissed again and this time it was him putting his need into her mouth. She found it difficult not to smile and kiss him back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are some scene snippets that I couldn't make work that I may throw on after this.


	9. Cosmic Rays (Particle 3,057 BQR)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cosmic Rays (High speed, energetic particles (about 90% of which are protons) originating from space that impinges on Earth's atmosphere. Some are generated by our own Sun, some by supernovas, some by as yet unknown events in the farthest reaches of the visible universe. The term "ray" is a misnomer, as cosmic particles arrive individually, not in the form of a ray or beam of particles. -https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/glossary.html)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am putting these here because my brain wants to move on and I think they are too cute to die on my external drive.

He looked up when she came out of the bedroom still fussing with the clasp on her necklace. A look not unlike a pout passed over his face.

“What was that?”

“Nothing,” he countered.

“Right,” Donna said. “Do this for me?” She turned her back to him so that he might take over dealing with the closure. “Now, the face.”

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing Joshua. You made a face. An unhappy face.”

“It’s not a big deal. Forget it.”

She looked down at herself. “Is there something on my skirt?” She stepped away, inspecting more closely than she did in the mirror—they were running late. “What is it?” She looked at him and watched his eyes drift to her sweater. Inspecting it, she pulled it out and did not notice a snag, pilling, a stain, or anything else. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing,” he said and turned back to packing his backpack.

“What?” She turned towards the window which—since it was still dark outside—was like a mirror. “Did we stretch it out funny?” Didn’t look like it. “What’s wrong with the sweater, Josh?”

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit. You like this sweater, and now there’s something wrong with it. Tell me or we’ll both be late because I’m going to change.” She waited, tapping her foot because she couldn’t help it, but he didn’t cave. “Fine,” she spun on her heel, and he grabbed her wrist to pull her back.

“It’s not… there’s nothing wrong with the sweater. It’s just…” he sighed. “You wore it last week.”

“I know which is when you said, ‘I love this sweater’ and now it gets the face.”

“I have fond memories of this sweater, Donna, I swear.”

“I know you do I was there, in case you forgot, you know, wearing the sweater. So…” she crossed her arms.

“It’s just…you went shopping with Zoey yesterday and you wouldn’t let me look in the bags and I thought… I don’t know.”

“What? What did you think, Josh?”

“You usually wear the new stuff the next day,” his hand spilled from her wrist to her hand, wrapped around her fingers, “and I guess I was expecting it to be a new sweater.”

“Ah,” she kissed him on the check. “Was that so bad? God, you’d think I was the dentist,” she mumbled, pulling away to put on her coat. “Oh, and Josh?”

“Yeah,” he said absently, finishing up his packing.

“It’s not the sweater that’s new,” she threw him a saucy look and went to sweep past and out the door.

“Okay,” he said snagging her around the waist and pulling her back against him. “Now we are gonna be late.”

She laughed, reminded him how early staff was today and called out to Ahsan on the door. She had every intention of making him wait until after he’d eaten a heathy dinner before he got to see her model her purchases from the day before.


	10. Cosmic Rays (Particle 891 MDY)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cosmic Rays (High speed, energetic particles (about 90% of which are protons) originating from space that impinges on Earth's atmosphere. Some are generated by our own Sun, some by supernovas, some by as yet unknown events in the farthest reaches of the visible universe. The term "ray" is a misnomer, as cosmic particles arrive individually, not in the form of a ray or beam of particles. -https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/glossary.html)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should note that the Amy from this story is taking up residence with my muse and seems to really need to get drunk and confide in Donna [shrugs].

“So what _are_ we going to do about the Amy thing?” Josh asked uneasily.

“Mmm, uh…actually I was thinking we could set her up with Stanley.”

Josh pulled back to see more her face and less her neck. “Keyworth?”

“Yeah. I mean if her gut reaction to being proposed to is hook up with you,” she rolled her eyes—she does cute jealousy—“that’s… well, it’s not healthy or sustainable, so I thought maybe…. He got through your thick skull.”

“You want the Chief of Staff to require the Director of Legislative Affairs to seek therapy?” ‘Cause that didn’t sound like a thing one could put on a performance review.

“No, that would be horrendously problematic especially as she is a woman and it could be construed as patronizing, not to mention illegal. I was just thinking,” she shrugged and kissed him, “a party or something. They could both be there.”

There was a growing sense of alarm moving from the back of his brain forward. “I’m pretty sure he has a person.”

“I’m not saying he should be the next one proposing to her Josh,” she said cutting her eyes down to where he was still hovering over her neckline. “We still have to work with her and it would be great if we could be confident that she wouldn’t be sexually assaulting you again any time soon.”

“You really can’t ever, ever call it that.” Okay, the alarm was more of a persistent ringing now. 

“Josh, did she have your consent to touch you in a sexual manner?” His insides were in general buzzing with the force of the ringing.

“No.”

“Did she?”

“Well, yeah.” _Oh, so much badness is about to happen_.

“That’s sexual assault. Unwanted, unconsensual.” Still Donna was pretty cute when her cheeks got pink even if she looked like she was going to throw things at him… or somebody.

“Okay, I agree with you, Antioch. But if we call it that her career is over. I have to take it to the President and her career ends in SNL skits and bad Leno jokes.” He waited two beats to see what Donna might say in return. “I just want you to understand what it will mean if we do.”

“Okay, but I mean it about the getting her help thing. What on Earth could have been going through her mind?”

_Always a good question_ ; and one josh himself had had many, many times. “I’ve known her since my twenties and I can’t tell you what she’s been thinking for a minute of any of it. But I think she was sacred. I don’t know if you picked up on this, but she’s worse about commitment than I am.” He was regretfully pulling away; this conversation was not going to be ending quite the way he’d hoped not to long ago. 

“What happened to you being committed to being where I am?”

“Well… it’s you,” he said simply.

“You won, you know,” she said stroking a hand down his face. “You don’t have to keep being sweet.” If he could keep to the sweet end of the spectrum here, he might be able to get where he’d been heading earlier; he wasn’t betting on it. 

“I’m not sucking up—although I will definitely be doing that later—I’m being honest.”

“Hmm, I like it.” Donna rested her head against his, a grin dancing around her face. “So the dragon of the West Wing was scared, huh?”

“Who calls her the dragon?” Because he’d heard the staff and the House call her a lot of things over the years but this was news to him.

“Well, mostly the ‘dragon lady,’” which sounded much more familiar, “but that’s a sexist fear of emasculation and a need to vilify women who wield authority like, you know, authority. Tell me more about what Amy looks like when she’s scared. I want to be able to spot it.”

He shrugged, “I think you’ll notice because she drinks a lot and then she cries.” 

“She was drunk and crying?”

“She wasn’t drunk; she has the tolerance of a dragon, male or female parts not withstanding.” He leaned back along the couch, making his peace with the topic that wasn’t going to die soon enough. “Yeah, she was crying and I was trying to…you know.”

“Comfort her?”

“Get her to stop.” Although, yeah, comfort her was a strategy. Mostly he’d been the one uncomfortable. Amy’s human emotions had never been what he would call predictable. He’d assume she’d be charmed or furious and the oppotise would be true. “And then she was kissing me and I didn’t… I swear Donna I was like seventy-five percent confused and fifty percent freaked out.” He still was when he thought about it though there was an additional level of fear because of what had followed. 

“That’s more than a hundred percent.”

“Exactly.”

“Ohhh, poor baby,” she said curling up against him in his new position and stroking his face again.

“You’re patronizing me?”

“Mmmuhuh,” she hummed petting his hair like he was one of her old roommate’s cats. 

“So let me get this straight, you moved out, broke-up with me, and refused to speak to me over it and now just a few days later you are mocking my pain?”

“And aren’t you glad about that?”

“Yes,” _emphatically_ , “I am seventy-five percent confused and a hundred-ten percent grateful.” He went back to kissing her neck while she laughed.

“This is why the President as so many economic advisers.”

“And aren’t _you_ glad about that?” he returned.

“Yes, it means I get to keep all your ridiculous math to myself.” She could have any old part of him he wanted. He didn’t need a bit of it.


End file.
